Newspaper editors are like football club managers: they come and, often rather abruptly, they go. But not, usually, when their paper is making exemplary profits, performing solidly against any competition and holding its digital place in the unique browser league. That would be like giving Arsène Wenger the chop on a wet Tuesday afternoon, a weird, unpredictable lurch. But Tony Gallagher at the Daily Telegraph assuredly knows how it feels now.

The two Telegraphs are expected to make £60m between them in the latest financial year. Profits up, not down. Daily print sales – 2.35% lower between December 2012 and 2013 – represent the best result for any full-service paper in Fleet Street. (Full-price circulation is actually higher than 12 months before.) Digital monthly uniques, too, are up 7% over the same period, topping 60 million, way beyond the reach of the following pack. So what's not to like? Why the sudden slamming of doors? This isn't Man U in a rocky season. Something deeper must be going on here: and surely it is.

For it's not exactly clear who steps in as Gallagher's successor – or whether, in traditional terms, there will actually be any successor at all. The group "editor-in-chief" of the daily and Sunday titles is Jason Seiken, brought over from America four months ago where he'd boosted the fortunes of the Public Broadcasting Service by retooling Sesame Street for the smartphone era. Chris Evans, the Telegraph's assistant editor for news, takes over as "acting editor (print) from Monday to Friday" and Ian MacGregor from the Sunday gets Saturday as well in a bumper weekend bundle of "acting" responsibility.

But both of them report to Seiken, so the Telegraph has finally made the big leap, hasn't it? That dynamic bound beyond the horizon that labels it a modern, thrusting digital media company – not some print legacy business eking out its declining days?

Which is where the mists gather. Normally, in slammed door terms, you'd expect to find personality clashes or bitter arguments of principle. But here there are neither. Gallagher and Seiken seem to have had a perfectly amicable relationship. Gallagher is no digital Luddite: on the contrary, his speeches about Telegraph transformation have been heralded as some of Fleet Street's finest and, a year ago, he was himself offered the overarching role Seiken was later recruited to fill. More, the Telegraph's seasoned, successful chief executive, Murdoch MacLennan, has many a time sung Gallagher's praises over the last four years. For mist, read fog.

Wade through the murk, though. Remember the time, almost 10 years ago, when the Barclay brothers bought the Telegraph (for a whopping £665m). And I, of course, remember the hiring of Will Lewis from the Sunday Times to devise a giant, state-of-the-integrated-art newsroom in brand new Victoria headquarters. Lewis talked the future-talk buoyantly (and will naturally carry on talking it in his new job as boss of Dow Jones in New York). He went on to be editor himself – during the MPs' expenses furore – and then fell out with MacLennan over digital strategy. In fact, when you trawl back through a stretching list of hirings, promotions and departures, something of a pattern emerges.

So many online wonder-workers passing through! Yet so little evidence of stickability or momentum as the Mail and the Guardian shoot past the Telegraph's once-commanding lead in the uniques league. You can see why Gallagher didn't fancy the supposed top role for himself: think manager of Crystal Palace in a dodgy season. You can also see, in perception at least, how downgrading the whole newspaper side of the equation might work. If the Barclays want a digital-first operation, this, demonstratively, signals its arrival – at a stroke.

None of which makes for easy praise or blame. The Telegraph, with a relatively elderly, conservative, non-metropolitan readership, isn't a natural leader of the online revolution. In fact, its print stability (much helped by an effective subscription scheme) is fundamental to continuing profitability. Almost all of that £60m profit stems from print in a world where costs come carefully constrained and caution habitually rules. There's a lot here that the Barclays can admire – up to, but perhaps not beyond, the point where they wonder whether their £665m punt can ever be turned into an even bigger profit if and when the time comes to sell.

Yet can Seiken, an engagingly liberal local journalist from the Boston suburbs who hasn't worked in any sort of newspaper for 17 years, deliver such goods? Do his early lectures to the troops about bottom-up initiatives rather than top-down command and control operations hold the key to miracle renewal, as some who've heard them hope? Or are they stock bromides that go with sucked thumbs? Is journalism even the problem here, rather than technical efficiencies and basic managerial alignments that haven't moved far enough, fast enough? In short: is it the Telegraph's journalism that went wrong, or its owners' expectation of what might be possible?

I guess Gallagher will get a new job soon enough. Digital giants who want to get into news seem to know his strength. The Mail – where he helped devise Mail Online – were sad to lose him. But incoming "editors-in-chief" who don't have the obvious editorial experience to make the big calls of journalism, British not American, political not technical? That's more problematic in a global landscape where, frankly, no traditional newspaper has consistently struck internet gold yet.

Let's not pretend there are magic formulas on bargain offer here. American papers are meshed in just the same toils. They hire their wizards – Mark Thompson, Will Lewis – from the UK. Journalism is a world market with dreams aplenty; but it is still hard, unforgiving work in progress (as Arsène Wenger might add, with a trademark shrug).